When I was a kid, we had a post-Thanksgiving ritual of setting up the Christmas decorations. This had to occur the Friday and weekend after Thanksgiving. My Mom is a pack rat so this was no small chore. The kids had to cart huge boxes in from the garage and storage room; boxes full of tcotchkes--Christmas tree ashtrays, red and green felt wall-hangings, macrame santas, and ornaments. Hundreds of ornaments. Ornaments were Christmas currency in my extended family. No adult walked into a family gathering without ornaments for the kids. My aunts were very craftsy and often made our ornaments. Each one we received had our name and the year inscribed on it.
Since Olive turned one, I've been thinking about how even the most seemingly mundane traditions are developed, and how they create meaning later in life. This weekend, I pulled out a box that my mother sent me of all of the ornaments I had received as a child. Had she not sent this box I would have nothing to put on our Christmas tree--the one we have yet to purchase.
"This is your deal," Jesse said to me. Meaning, because I'm the one who celebrates Christmas in our household, I am in charge of the tree. But this really wasn't true. Even though Jesse is Jewish he does have a say, because anything impacting the house immediately falls into his bucket. If I weren't a Gentile I would have recused myself from holiday decorating altogether. All these years I've lived on my own I've never had a Christmas tree. It made no sense to buy one, as I always traveled to my mother's or my sister's house during the holidays. But this year is different. We've decided to stay home for Christmas, and I want Olive to be as excited as I was as a child by the ritual and spectacle of holiday decorating. Sure, she may be only a year old, but we started early in my childhood home. Very early.
A part of the decorating ritual that I did not like growing up was setting up the Christmas Tree, or more accurately, "building" the tree. The trunk was a series of camouflaged tubes that connected to each other and was slipped vertically into a small stand, followed by the branches labeled A through F. Dad did the high branches. Next came the tinsel, which Mom did, then the lights, which Dad did. Then came the ornaments, which all of the kids did, with coaching from my mother:
"Sweetie, don't put the heavy ones on the looser branches ..."
"Put the broken ones toward the back."
"Put the ones Aunt Mary made for you there..."
"Let your brother put his on!"
This part took an hour or more.
As a kid I didn't realize that people actually BOUGHT real trees. For years now I've fantasized about getting a real tree, but Jesse feared that wasn't sustainable. I had to agree.
This weekend I researched artificial trees and was shocked to find that they now come pre-lit--a feature that has probably been around for years. There were so many options. Jesse did more research on PVC, a common chemical in artificial trees and decided that the off-gassing involved with an artificial tree was worse than the sustainability issues he had with buying a live tree.
"We'll buy locally," he said, "and we'll compost it." On the one hand I was relieved--we'd live out my fantasy of having a real tree in the living room. On the other, more practical, hand, I was worried. We'd now need to buy lights and a proper tree stand. I'd have to keep the tree hydrated every day. Would Olive pick off pine needles and leave them in random corners of the house?
Jesse and I debated the timing of purchasing the tree. My take: I leave on a business trip tomorrow--no time like the present. Jesse's more thoughtful take: Let's buy the accessories now and wait until you get back before buying the tree. It made sense, but it poked a hole in my ritual of having the house set up the weekend after Thanksgiving. Granted it was a long-neglected ritual, but I still kept it close.
Jesse didn't understand that without a tree we couldn't have a family picture--another piece of my holiday fantasy once Olive was old enough of having a yearly family photograph embedded in a lovely holiday card. I'm not religious, but in the past I've been religious about sending holiday cards, until about five years ago when the business took over every crevice of my free time. I gave them up begrudgingly and temporarily forgot them. Last year Jesse reasoned with me that our birth announcements added up to enough snail mail correspondence with family and friends to hold us over until the next year. I told Jesse of my plan this year to get a picture done in time to send out cards before the holidays.
"No way," Jesse said. "You are cramming in way too much! You are traveling up to the holidays. And I won't have the time to do it."
"I'll make the time," I said.
I totally understood where Jesse was coming from, but I felt like I'd run out of excuses for not doing the things I loved to do around the holidays. I feel ready to embrace them again. Not because I have the time, but because I want Liv to be surrounded by what I had as a kid--the feeling that for a few weeks time stood still. No one had to be anywhere else. Family and friends meant everything.
